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Live 9.7 Beta Comes with New Features for Push, Simpler & Link

The latest beta of Ableton Live has just been released to all testers, version 9.7. And I can tell you, Push users are really getting spoiled lately. Live 9.6 just came out with plenty of great new features for Push and 9.7 adds even more. And they'll be available on both versions of Push, not just 2.

Ableton are certainly making sure that we all want to work with Push as they're improving the workflow for studio and stage evermore. Added sample manipulation options, a new drum layout, beatmaking with Push is getting much easier and fun.

Watch Tec Beatz using some of the features:

Watch him discuss how he used these features for his performance:

The most important features for Push in Live 9.7:

New slicing functions - chop samples by beat divisions or regions, as well as manually or by transients.

New drum layout - with 16 set velocity levels for playing and programming more dynamic beats.

Hands-on audio routing - select and record ins and outs directly from Push for sampling external or internal audio without disrupting your flow.

Visual feedback for tighter recordings - new display info shows clip phase and count-in so you can start and finish clip recordings more accurately.

I've already seen some complaints online that all the improvement were only great for Push users. While the majority indeed are, there's also some new features for Live users. The new slices modes for Push also translate back into Live with new Simpler Slicing modes (Beat, Region, Manual). And now anything connected via Link will have its beat time aligned when starting Live’s playback with Tap Tempo or via Looper.

Live 9.7 will come out later this year and be free for all owners of Live 9. If you'd like to test out Live 9.7 beta now, you can join the Ableton beta community.

Now that we know there's going to be another update to Push and quite possible not the last, what does this means for Live 10? Live 9.7 is going to come out after thorough beta testing, so we're going to be pretty close to the last quarter of the year by then. And considering that Ableton are still adding new mouth-watering features for Push suggests that they're in no hurry with Live 10. It certainly doesn't look like it will be released this year or early 2017. Of course, this is just me thinking out loud. I'd rather they take their time and release an incredible and stable jubilee version. When do you think Live 10 will see the light of day?

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Madeleine Bloom is a musician, producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer from Berlin. She studied Electroacoustic Music at the Franz Liszt Conservatory. In the last few years she's worked as a technical support for Ableton and has helped countless people with her in-depth knowledge of Ableton Live, various other music apps as well as audio engineering.

I’m more in your line of thinking with Ableton X Madeleine. I don’t think it will be a rush job. It seems right now Ableton are in fact concentrating a lot of upfront resources on getting PUSH2 to be THE performance choice for musicians using Ableton Live. You see this in the improvements to readouts, audio routing abilities, rethinking certain sequencer params and various copy/paste additions for Session… Even Simpler is known for being a major player in Performances and so now one can Warp exactly as needed for a specific recording. I would love to see however a tighter integration with ARRANGEMENT view in the future because I use the unit more in the composition phase. Still most movements must be done from the Arrangement window. It would be nice to have an Arrangement Layout on the controller. Maybe a future edition will have this. Performance just seems to be taking a higher priority for now, although many of these new functionalities are definitely good in the studio as well, and there have in fact been small improvements to the way one can record PUSH2 MIDI into the Arrangement. I don’t even wish to speculate what Ableton X will offer. I hope they will continue to develop the browser and organisation aspect. I also hope for more user-friendly composition in the Arrangement window. Snapping can be a real pain when one is in a creative flow. And last but not least I hope for even more stability between Live and MFL. Things tend to break more often than desired and when things break one loses the creative air in the lungs…so ever more stability is desired.

Will you guys continue to develop OSCillot, by the way? Would really appreciate more videos on that one. So much potential but the learning curve is steep ;) Maybe you could do a feature here?

Thank you for your thoughts. I would love to see a better integration of Push in the Arrangement View as well. It’s still the area where I’m missing lots of features and end up using Push a lot less than would be possible. And yes to all of your feature wishes for Live 10.

Well, I’m not involved with OSCillot, that’s all Max for Cats, but I know that updates for it are planned, but Christian and Nico have been rather busy lately and haven’t gotten around to it yet. Also more videos are planned for the future.